Caught on video: 8 floppy drives playing a Final Fantasy 6 symphony

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Floppy drives have long since gone the way of the Dodo in modern computers. However, it turns out they’re still good for something. YouTuber MrSolidSnake745 has a way of wiring an array of old floppy drives together to form a chorus of screeching retro tunes. Last time it was Ghostbusters, and now the classic gaming track The Decisive Battle from Final Fantasy 6 had been recreated on eight floppy drives.

Most moving components in PCs make some kind of noise, but the stepper motors in floppies are perfect for this musical transformation. These motors are very loud and uniform, so the only barrier is getting them to actually sound like music. It’s a serious barrier, though.

MrSolidSnake745 uses a custom piece of software that is able to deconstruct a MIDI file, and turn into serial data packets. When fed into a floppy drive, this can instruct the stepper motor to “step” a certain number of times per second, thus producing a note. Put a few of these together, and you can play a song.

The whole show is run from a Maple microcontroller made by LeafLabs. This is an alternative to the standard Arduino MrSolidSnake745 was using before, and it’s reportedly much better for his particular application. The setup is not easy, and even getting power to a bunch of old floppy drives is a tall order. Your time is probably better spent marveling at how cool the video is. You can, however, download all the audio and MIDI files if you want to give it a go.

MrSolidSnake745 says the next few videos will also be classic game tunes, so keep an eye out for those.